(NFR) flores man

New Member

New hobbit man discovered that lived on island with miniature elephants and dragons.
That reminds me of a grateful dead concert I once attended.

from the article:

The scientists describe the island as "a kind of Lost World" of bizarre
extinct species such as a dwarf form of the primitive elephant Stegodon as
well as giant rats, full-sized Komodo dragons and an even larger species
of giant lizard

Senior Member

Remember when you could remember everything?

There are a half dozen stories on homo floresiensis at http://www.nature.com Since it appears that he/she lived there concurrently with homo sapiens, this discovery is gonna raise some thorny contradictions with the creationist's notion of Adam and Eve.

Formerly tbc1415

There are a half dozen stories on homo floresiensis at http://www.nature.com Since it appears that he/she lived there concurrently with homo sapiens, this discovery is gonna raise some thorny contradictions with the creationist's notion of Adam and Eve.

Bert Roberts, one of the three authors that published the paper that appeared in the British scientific journal Nature, had this to say about the concurrency between Florensiensis and Homo Sapiens.

"We don't know for certain. We have skeletal remains of modern humans in Borneo (Niah Cave) about 43,000 years old, and in southeastern Australia (Lake Mungo) about 40,000 years old, so there were certainly modern humans on the Asian and Australian continents (Borneo forming part of the Asia mainland during the ice ages), which lie on either side of Flores. So, on the face of it, we should expect at least 20,000 years of overlap between H. sapiens and Flores man. But the earliest direct evidence for modern humans on Flores is just 11,000 years ago, immediately above the layer of volcanic ash that sealed the fate of the hobbits and the pygmy elephants. So did the two species ever meet one another? Perhaps, but perhaps not! And this is one clear instance of where the search for evidence must continue"!

Personally, I hope that evidence is found to support the possibility of concurrent existence. Throughout recorded history, there have been reports from all over the globe of other humanoid forms living in remote areas. Fact or Fiction? Who knows but it sure would add some interesting elements to certain areas of science, as well as some religious beliefs.

Regarding the thorny contradictions with the creationist's.
Well…. Creationism as well as many other fundamental (faith based) beliefs simply have no need for science or even rational thought itself. Faith is one thing, science is another. Their faith becomes their fact. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
For instance, it allows me to believe with full conviction that direct descendents of Florensiensis still exist today.
In fact, I truly believe that one of these small statured, small brained, hairy men can be seen every day criss-crossing the country on the last leg of his campaign trail.

New Member

I think the significance of this find is that the so called seperation of apes and humans is becoming quite tenuous. We already know that we share something like 98.6% identical DNA to chimpanzees. As Jared Diamond points out in "The Third Chimpanzee", technically chimpanzees should be categorized as just another sub species of homo along with sapiens, neanderthal...

Some of the skeletel remains date back only 12,000 years, with a good chance that they will find even more recent remains. This is truly a *huge* discovery in the area of human evolution..."the biggest in a hundred years" as some anthropologists are stating. Is is also noted that indigenous people of the region contain references to a creature like this in their oral tradition, so it is almost assured that they coexisted with these little fellows at some point.

As for the whole religious issue, the story of natural history and human evolution is just as compelling and fantastic as anything found in the bible, and it surely makes one ponder the existence of some intelligent force behind it all. Nor sure why the two ideas need to be mutually exclusive. However, in order to accept the findings of anthropology and evolution you have to eat a big piece of humble pie and come to understand that the earth and all its plants and animals wasn't put here for the sake of man (A belief, I contend, that is partially to blame for the envrionmental shituation we find ourselves in). We're just one species amongst them all, very closely related to many other species, subject to the same laws of biology and ecology as the rest of the living world and when we break those laws and overstep our bounds smackdown cometh.

coonrad

There has got to be a God; the world could not have become so f*****d up by chance alone. --Ed Abbey

Remember when you could remember everything?

Precisely. Prior to the discovery of homo floresiensis, the prevailing notion of hominid evolution held that there was little if any overlap between previous succeeding species. Neanderthal, cro magnon, homo sapiens, successively replaceed each other, passing through time in a neat and tidy sequence, like floats in a parade. Floresiensis is turning that notion on its head with the very distinct probability that two different but closely related species from the same genus existed on earth at the same time.

One of the online Nature articles mentioned an ox-sized animal which had been discovered in remote SE Asia about 5 years ago. If it's possible that researchers failed to 'discover' a beast the size of an ox, it also may be possible that supposedly mythological creatures like leprechauns, Yeti, or bigfoot may also have existed.

Actually the more recent studies I've seen show the number more like 95%.
Care to guess how 'identicial' we are to pigs? Heck there is a little segmented worm that shares 75% of our DNA.

Biological similarities between all life should be expected no matter what you believe about our origins. It's not DNA that seperates man from beast, rather it shows we share a common design. Whether that design came about by chance or by the hand of our Creator is something up to the individual to decide.